MORE STUFF! Empellón's Alex Stupak Ponders Fear

Fearlessness isn't a thing. Not in this business.

[MORE STUFF! is home to all the little nuggets we stuffed in our pockets months or weeks or days ago because we liked the way they read, or looked, or sounded. It's kinda like finding a $20 bill in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn since last winter.]

Honestly, I’m far more driven by
fear. What’s more important is to
recognize fear as a boundary, or as something that you need to push through in
order to expand yourself.

I think in life in general, there’s
a worry…how do I describe it? When things are working, there’s a temptation to
do nothing. To change life in any meaningful way is to push against that.

[Opening Empellón] was the most
logical progression I could make. I knew a lot of people didn’t, or wouldn’t,
or still don’t get it. It’s difficult, because no one knew or cared who I was
before. No one even cared about who I was as a pastry chef until I left Alinea
and went to WD-50. Until that moment, very few people even knew who I was. Ironically,
I fell into pastry completely by accident. I just ended up sticking with it. I
started off cooking savory. Now the Mexican thing came out of nowhere because I
was kind of keeping it to myself. I had been thinking of this thing for years.

Sooner or later, you have to make
a jump. Or, not. You don’t have to do anything. For me, I had always had it in
my head that I would have my own restaurant someday. The idea of manufacturing
one around pastry never seemed logical. I wanted to be involved in everything,
in all aspects of it.

I can tell you that going into
it, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. You meet with everyone you can
think of that’s done it, you ask a million questions, you do a ton of research.
The only one truth you keep arriving at is that everyone who’s made this leap,
it all happened in a different way. There’s no textbook way to get it done.
There just isn’t.
The line between mediocre
cooking and good cooking and great cooking is the conviction of the person, and
how hard they’re willing to try. Successful people, great people, do the things
other people don’t feel like doing.